Did Ted Cruz Leak Classified Information? Then So Did a Former NSA Chief.

Cruz’s comments echo what former NSA and CIA head Michael Hayden has already said in public.

John Locher/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


A testy exchange between Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz at Tuesday’s Republican debate turned on Wednesday into a question of whether Cruz accidentally leaked classified information in public. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Wednesday that his office was looking into whether Cruz had revealed any secrets as he defended his yes vote on a National Security Agency reform bill earlier this year.

Neither Burr nor his office specified what information Cruz may have revealed, but it’s widely believed to be Cruz’s claim that the USA Freedom Act, an NSA reform bill passed in May, would actually expand the reach of intelligence. Whether or not the information is classified, however, it was already known to the public, thanks to government officials including Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who ran both the CIA and the NSA during his career.

Rubio attacked Cruz for voting for USA Freedom, which ended the NSA’s mass collection of phone records and replaced it with a system that requires the NSA to get a federal judge’s approval to get data from phone companies. Cruz responded that the new system would actually make more records open to the NSA. “The old program covered 20 percent to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists,” he said. “The new program covers nearly 100 percent.”

That lines up with what Hayden said during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation on March 30, 2014, when Hayden appeared on the show with former CIA deputy director Michael Morell and others to discuss national security issues. Morell was a member of a panel convened in 2013 by President Barack Obama to review intelligence collection, and that group recommended the end of bulk metadata collection in favor of the new system. Hayden agreed with the move for the same reasons Cruz gave. “Over time, the percentage of overall billing records the NSA was retrieving got smaller and smaller,” he told host Bob Schieffer. “Michael [Morell]’s panel pointed out that they’re only getting about a third, if that, just because of changes in technology. The NSA gets to query the data…in an exhaustive way, not that one-third they’ve formerly gotten.”

The Washington Post cited unnamed US government officials in an article in February 2014 who made the same claim of a 30 percent collection rate as Cruz, noting that “the government is taking steps to restore the collection—which does not include the content of conversations—closer to previous levels.”

The information may still be classified: Making a secret public doesn’t change its classified status as far as the government is concerned. But if Cruz supposedly put national security at risk over his comments last night, he was far from the first to do so.

Update, 12/16/15, 4:55 pm: Sens. Burr and Dianne Feinstein, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement on Wednesday afternoon that “the Committee is not investigating anything said during last night’s Republican Presidential debate.”

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate